Secular Britain on the spot. Asking the residents of well healed Surrey if they want to pay for social services in a local referendum.
Oh give it a rest Vlad - what on earth has this to do with secularism.
There are some important issues here (none of which have anything to do with separation of church and state).
To my mind this is a really challenging issue as our whole approach to financing local services is through a dual funding mechanism - where there is a block grant from central government and the relevant council also raises money locally. The underlying reason is that different parts of the country have differing needs in terms of services and expenditure and different abilities to generate tax revenue locally due to wealth differential.
This referendum jeopardised that principle - on the basis that it is shifting the balance from central to local government, running the risk that affluent areas (which greater capacity to raise money locally and withstand a 15% council tax hike) are able to fund services properly. While poorer areas where this approach will never work as the local people simply do not have sufficient wealth to fill the gap in funding from central government end up with increasingly substandard services.
Central government is supposed to deal with this issue by redistribution of tax raised nationally to local areas on the basis of need.
